Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

delegated performance
accompanies many of the projects mentioned above, since they frequently
take place in countries already at the disadvantaged end of globalisation,
most notably in Central and South America. Consequently, he has been
heavily criticised for merely repeating the inequities of capitalism, and
more specifi cally of globalisation, in which rich countries ‘outsource’ or
‘offshore’ labour to low- paid workers in developing countries. Yet Sierra
always draws attention to the economic systems through which his works
are realised, and the way these impact upon the work’s reception. In his
work, performance is outsourced via recruitment agencies and a fi nancial
transaction takes place that leaves the artist at arm’s length from the
performer; this distance is evident in the viewer’s phenomenological
encounter with the work, which is disturbingly cold and alienated. Unlike
many artists, Sierra is at pains to make the details of each payment part of
the work’s description, turning the economic context into one of his
primary materials. 6
In its emphasis on the phenomenological immediacy of the live body
and on specifi c socio- economic identities, we could argue that this type of
delegated performance owes most to the body art tradition of the late 1960s
and early 1970s. At the same time, it differs from this precursor in important
ways. Artists in the 1970s used their own bodies as the medium and
material of the work, often with a corresponding emphasis on physical and
psychological transgression. Today’s delegated performance still places a
high value upon immediacy, but if it has any transgressive character, this
tends to derive from the perception that artists are exhibiting and exploiting
other subjects. 7 As a result, this type of performance, in which the artist
uses other people as the material of his or her work, tends to occasion
heated debate about the ethics of representation. Duration, meanwhile, is
reconfi gured from a spiritual question of individual stamina and endurance
to the economic matter of having suffi cient resources to pay for someone
else’s ongoing presence.
A second strand of delegated performance, which began to be introduced
in the later 1990s, concerns the use of professionals from other
spheres of expertise: think of Allora and Calzadilla hiring opera singers
(Sediments, Sentiments [Figures of Speech], 2007) or pianists (Stop, Repair,
Prepare, 2008), of Tania Bruguera hiring mounted policemen to demonstrate
crowd- control techniques (in Tatlin’s Whisper 5, 2008), or of Tino
Sehgal hiring university professors and students for his numerous speech-
based situations (This Objective of That Object, 2004; This Progress, 2006). 8
These performers tend to be specialists in fi elds other than that of art or
performance, and since they tend to be recruited on the basis of their
professional (elective) identity, rather than for being representatives of a
particular class or race, there is far less controversy and ambivalence
around this type of work. Critical attention tends to focus on the conceptual
frame (which more often than not is instruction- based) and on the
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